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2021 | Book

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to NewSpace Read chapter Read first chapter

NewSpace Systems Engineering

Author: Ignacio Chechile

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book provides a guide to engineering successful and reliable products for the NewSpace industry. By discussing both the challenges involved in designing technical artefacts, and the challenges of growing an organisation, the book presents a unique approach to the topic.

New Space Systems Engineering explores numerous difficulties encountered when designing a space system from scratch on limited budgets, non-existing processes, and great deal of organizational fluidity and emergence. It combines technical topics related to design, such as system requirements, modular architectures, and system integration, with topics related to organizational design, complexity, systems thinking, design thinking and a model based systems engineering.

Its integrated approach mean this book will be of interest to researchers, engineers, investors, and early-stage space companies alike. It will help New Space founders and professionals develop their technologies and business practices, leading to more robust companies and engineering development.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to NewSpace
Abstract
If there is something NewSpace has redefined is the way risks are taken when it comes to designing and building space systems. NewSpace has created its own flavor of Systems Engineering, which has almost nothing to do with the “historical” discipline of Systems Engineering school of thought. Early stage NewSpace organizations do not only have the challenge to design and build a mission-critical complex artifact such as a spacecraft but also to design the whole organization around it, which makes them very vulnerable and prone to failure. It all indicates our dependency on satellites will only increase, which means orbits are getting crowded. NewSpace has the responsibility of making an ethical use of space to ensure sustainable access for the generations to come.
Ignacio Chechile
Chapter 2. From the Whiteboard to Space
Abstract
All things we create with our ingenuity go through a life cycle, even if not formally defined. This cycle is a mixture of divergence and convergence, construction and destruction, order and disorder, in cycles that are visited and revisited, over and over. Nothing  engineered is automatically nor magically created, but incrementally realized by the execution of a variety of activities, bringing objects from just abstract ideas to an operative device, which performs a job to fulfill a need. To achieve this, a set of factors must be surely taken care of: the business factor, the social factor, and the technical factor. In order to organize the huge task of turning rather fuzzy ideas into an operable space system on scarce resources and without clear requirements, NewSpace organizations must carefully break the work down into smaller pieces they can manage, and then put the pieces back together. The social interactions while designing those systems, and the inescapable connection between the way people interact and the systems they design, shape the journey from beginning to end.
Ignacio Chechile
Chapter 3. Knowledge Management and Understanding
Abstract
Startups have the unique opportunity to define a knowledge management (KM) strategy early in their lifetime and avoid the pain of realizing its importance too late down the road. NewSpace enterprises must grow as a body of knowledge to gain the understanding needed in order to create successful technical systems, and usually such knowledge grows largely unstructured. Multidisciplinary projects are composed of people from different backgrounds, with different terminologies and different past experiences, which impose challenges when it comes to sharing information throughout the design process. This chapter addresses the methods and tools such as diagrammatic reasoning, model-based systems engineering, concept maps, knowledge graphs, and hierarchical breakdown structures and how they can facilitate or complicate the design of space systems.
Ignacio Chechile
Chapter 4. Complexity Creep
Abstract
Design never ends, if allowed to continue. Designers are pushed by context to take snapshots and release their designs  to the intended audience when  some level of maturity is reached, or as deadlines dictate. Quantifying such maturity can be highly subjective, which encourages engineers to continue adding functionalities until some sort of external force tells them to stop. Complexity creep is not just a technical problem. Complexity creeps in every single aspect of a young organization. As things get more complex, they encroach, making switching barriers higher and creating all sorts of lock-ins, which can turn architectures too rigid.
Ignacio Chechile
Chapter 5. Modular Spacecraft Architectures
Abstract
Designers will claim by default that their designs are modular. But experience shows they tend to create largely integral architectures, often under the pretense of vertical integration and in-house know-how protection, incurring in troubling non-recurring costs, creating high-switch barriers, and more importantly, delaying time to orbit (and to market). Reality is that both vertical integration and IP protection can be achieved using modular open architectures. The important bit is to identify which blocks of the architecture are worth reinventing from scratch. In NewSpace, core differentiating technologies tend to be on the payloads and sensors. Hence, the spacecraft bus architecture can be commoditized by choosing standard backplane-based form factors, high-speed serial communication, and configurable interconnect fabrics.
Ignacio Chechile
Chapter 6. Simulating Cyber-Physical Systems
Abstract
Engineers create machines that interact with the surrounding physical reality for different purposes such as delivering a payload in orbit, controlling a chemical process, etc. These machines execute control laws in the cyber/computer domain and use sensors and actuators to gauge and affect the surrounding environment. In the process of developing such machines, we have to create synthetic realities which numerically re-create the physical laws in computers and in the laboratory, which we use to verify the control laws accordingly. Luckily, digital control computers are not able to tell if they are operating in their real environment or in synthetic ones, provided we supply them with consistent information which accurately mimics the behavior of the real processes, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Ultimately, we tell computers what type of laws they are ought to control; they can’t tell by themselves. Developing cyber-physical systems such as space systems requires a layered simulation-centric approach which will also need two- and three-dimensional visualization capabilities.
Ignacio Chechile
Chapter 7. NewSpace Bullshit
Abstract
In 2016, the word post-truth was selected “word of the year” by the Oxford Dictionary. Post-truth is a concept that denotes the vanishing of the shared standards for objective evidence and the intentional blur between facts, alternative facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth. In NewSpace in particular, due to its complexities and sci-fi halo, facts often give way to over-decorated fictions, which can stretch long distances unchecked. These fictions, shaped under the pressure of funding needs and the urge of growing  like there is no tomorrow, create some particular conditions where fads, fashions, imitation, and humbug are the norms.
Ignacio Chechile
Metadata
Title
NewSpace Systems Engineering
Author
Ignacio Chechile
Copyright Year
2021
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-66898-3
Print ISBN
978-3-030-66897-6
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66898-3

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